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OTTAWA—A Libyan man now living in Toronto who once claimed membership in a Libyan resistance organization has lost a bid to stay in Canada after the country’s top court dismissed his appeal.

The high court said a 2009 decision by the minister of public safety which cited the “national interest” as a reason to reject Muhsen Ahmed Agraira’s application for permanent residence in Canada was brief, but reasonable.

But lawyer Lorne Waldman, who took Agraira’s appeal to the high court, said the man has been caught in an absurd tangle.

“The irony in this case is this is a man who joined an organization supported by the West, funded by the U.S., which was trying to overthrow Moammar Gadhafi. He joined it after this organization had given up violence. He believed in democracy for Libya, a policy that Canada supports — in fact this organization was part of the coalition Canada supported when Gadhafi was overthrown.

“And yet he is being told he has to leave Canada after years of being here and being a productive member of society. It makes no sense. It’s one of the absurdities of Canada’s current immigration policy.”

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Waldman, reached in Vancouver, said Agraira “will obviously be disappointed” and will likely consider his next steps.

Peter Van Loan, the Conservative government’s public safety minister at the time, had pointed to Agraira’s membership in a group called the Libyan National Salvation Front, which is not officially a designated terrorist group.

The high court noted the minister’s decision said, in part: “There is evidence that LNSF has been aligned at various times with Libyan Islamic opposition groups that have links to Al Qaeda,” which is officially blacklisted. The minister also cited credibility issues in Agraira’s case.

Agraira has no criminal record and established a business earning more than $100,000 a year since coming to Canada. But when he arrived in 1997 after fleeing first to Germany from Libya, he applied for refugee status saying his membership in the LNSF put him in danger in Moammar Gadhafi’s Libya. He later married a Canadian woman who sponsored his application for permanent residency here.

In his application for permanent residency, Agraira claimed he had earlier exaggerated his involvement in the group. When he was turned down on national security grounds in 2002, Agraira applied for ministerial relief.

In August 2005, a briefing note to the minister from Canada Border Services Agency officials urged that Agraira be allowed to stay on the basis there was no evidence that his continued presence in Canada would be detrimental to Canada’s “national interest.”

But three years later, in January 2009, Van Loan rejected it anyway.

Federal Court Justice Richard Mosley sided with Agraira, saying the public safety minister’s exercise of discretion was rendered meaningless by taking “a simplistic view that the presence in Canada of someone who at some time in the past may have belonged to a terrorist organization abroad can never be in the national interest.” But that decision was overturned by the Federal Court of Appeal, and now by the Supreme Court of Canada.

The ruling focused on a broader reading of the term national interest “rather than one which would limit its meaning to the protection of public safety and national security.”

The ruling does not entirely wipe out Agraira’s chances of staying in Canada, as it is possible he could apply to remain on humanitarian and compassionate grounds.

However, amendments to the Immigration and Refugee Protection Act that passed into law Wednesday — under the so-called Faster Deportation of Foreign Criminals bill — would appear to remove any such possibility for other cases that may arise from now on.

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